The caveat at the moment of writing in 2014/2015 was to find
a way to eliminate the “middle” MCU, the well-loved Arduino Uno (or Arduino
Mega). It doesn’t make sense to forgo the ESP8266 that sports a 32bit CPU by
using an Arduino Uno that sports an 8bit CPU for computations. Over the several
months of dec14 to sept15, several IDE flavours/methodologies was released on
the Internet to use standalone ESP8266, e.g to use ESP8266 and the available IO
pins sans the Arduino Uno or Arduino Mega. From retrospective view, the cost of
deploying an IoT framework to collect data has gone down drastically with just
the standalone ESP8266 alone as the sentinel device. The flavours of standalone mode are ESP8266 Lua,
and ESP8266 Arduino IDE. Check out the reference section for details.

After two Maker Faires (Maker Faire Singapore, and Maker
Faire Shenzhen), one Tan Kah Kee Young Inventors Award which students won a Merit
Award, one SUTD Design & Technology Contest which students won third prize
and merit prize, one IDC Robocon which students represented Singapore, one IEEE
AIYEHUM 2015 which student shortlisted as finalist, and countless submissions
later; the hiatus is over. In Maker Faire Shenzhen, yours truly rub shoulders
with several big names in the industry; perhaps the mostly-male playing field (for
the record there were females; @juliewatai @sexycyborg, etc were surrounded by
hordes of testosterone raging males armed with cameras of various sizes firing
away, while your truly observe with amusement from afar) and the maker-ish aura
projected by yours truly. One of them was Zhao Zong (赵总) of
AI Thinker, the manufacturer of NodeMCU (a breakout version of the ESP8266 ESP12-E
and CP2102, with out of the box support for LUA). Yours truly landed his salty
porky hands on a bunch of NodeMCU v1.0 at very competitive price (友情价).

In this write up, yours truly is introducing the use of
NodeMCU v1.0 (black) with ESP8266 Arduino IDE 1.6.5. There are lots of write up
on the NodeMCU v0.9 or ESP8266 ESP-01 and variants with LUA, but information is
scarce for NodeMCU v1.0 and ESP8266 Arduino IDE. This post is also a superseding
update of an earlier how-to post of using ESP8266 ESP-01 with Arduino Mega and
the temperature data is streamed to thingspeak http://shin-ajaran.blogspot.sg/2015/01/iot-streaming-temperature-data-acquired.html
.

7.Program the source code to read DS18B20 using
one wire protocol and the acquired data to be sent to thingspeak.

8.Compile & upload source code to NodeMCU v1.0

9.Observe data update of sensor data on thingspeak.

Observation

Having done the above, congratulations on sending sendor data
using NodeMCU v1.0 with Arduino IDE. Now the biggest question comes begging,
does this ESP8266 Arduino IDE supports all
the fancy pansy libraries supported on vanilla Arduino IDE?? That is for us
to discover and update on the git hub page.

Implications

Internet enable any of your creations realised on Arduino
Uno (or mega) have become even simpler than previously thought. Yours truly traversed
the era of sending serial data, packing data for Ethernet, WiFly, ZigBee, and
now ESP8266. ESP8266 is very convenient to use.

What’s next?

Alright, time to internet enable my sous vide setup:
temperature sensor DS18B20 data streamed over the Internet to a cloud computing
facility to compute PID and then output the control data over the internet to control
the state of the solid state relay that in turn controls the AC appliance.
Earlier yours truly have controlled a IoT lamp from a virtual machine http://shin-ajaran.blogspot.sg/2015/01/internet-controlled-ac-appliances-with.html,
now is to connect the dots.